New Territories: Artist Astrid Preston Celebrates the Earth in a Landmark Nature Exhibition

Los Angeles based Swedish born painter Astrid Prestonhas long explored and invented new frontiers of an aesthetic naturalism, elegantly remaking urban and rural wildness into provocative, soul satisfying tapestries of life and parkland utopias. Her work has consistently taken technical and philosophical risks, achieved unique depth, and established Ms. Preston as one of America's most important contemporary landscape painters.

She conveys a never-sated astonishment about the work of other painters as diverse as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Anselm Kiefer and - in three recent trips to Japan - a profound Asian connection, particularly to Hiroshige, as well as Japan's remarkable 18th century painter, Itō Jakuchū. This latest exhibition, “New Territory” (Craig Krull Gallery, running through March 2nd), combines a philosophical array of brilliant sensuality in forty-three new works. It follows upon more than four decades of a highly public presence. Most of these paintings are on richly-veined hardwoods, some on stretched linen which resembles flawless silk. These works have transformed genial frames of both contemporary as well as historic reference into Zen-like masterpieces of restraint that at once challenge and comfort. Ms. Preston spent two years assembling this dazzling collection of her work, a quiet, habitable reminder of the critical haikus and the “awe and reverence for nature” that is core to her ethic and art-form.

Her Nordic origins are not obvious. There is little to suggest, for example, the influence of such Scandinavian giants as Edvard Bergh, the brothers Wilhelm and Magnus von Wright, Carl Larsson, Alfred Wahlberg or Johan Sevebom. Indeed, this most recent exhibition altogether heralds a unique approach to landscape, though one as luscious and inviting as any Édouard Vuillard interior across Paris.

"Villa Garden," 2012, oil on wood, 16 x 16 inches, by Astrid Preston

But there are other Swedish influences that reign supreme in Ms. Preston's governing similes; all seeming to center upon humanity's clear and present need to be immersed in as much nature as possible. As we ourselves are Nature, and a most meddling part of it, to be sure, I asked her about her particular passion for trees, which insinuate a looming, iconic centrality in much of her work.

“I photographed hundreds of trees across Japan. Everyone of them has a biography,” she ruminates aloud. “Certain trees are in the paintings, and if you were to come upon them in a park, or on a mountain top over Kyoto, for example, you would recognize an individual red or black pine; you can know them for who they are, I believe,” she says. "Do you think of yourself as an environmental activist, in some sense?" I ask.

"New Territory," 2012, 16 x 16 inches, oil on wood, by Astrid Preston

To which she replies: “My friend, the cinematographer Haskell Wexler once said that every time one paints a leaf, he/she is making an anti-war statement,” Ms. Preston declares; and she goes on to express how human beings all want to feel their fingers in the dirt. “We miss that. No matter how benign my landscape paintings, I suppose in the end they might well be construed as political acts. We look for beauty every day. And when a tree dies, we mourn the loss.” Hence, societies around the world need a great nature painter of Ms. Preston's stature like never before.

In this same vein, Ms. Preston acknowledges the huge difference between, say, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's ca. 1865 civil engineering of Paris - well laid out Reconstructionism, with enormous and orderly boulevards - versus the Paris she is particularly fond of, backstreets, with sinuous wandering lanes more in keeping with the animal trails we would all prefer, in our hearts, to follow: The difference between the Left Bank, and the Right Bank.

In Ms. Preston's latest exhibition she discloses a new-found desire to embrace still water - which has always posed theoretical problems for her, she confesses; but now, she has discovered how to make ponds and reflections work towards that aesthetic liberation she seeks; one that enables her to lavish in a single, brave line, painted with a five-zero (super-fine) brush, all the dreams of a songbird or a crane; to give mottled light upon the dabbling mallards;

a Monet-like ephemerality that anchors, in this instance, all of Japan to the fact it is an island, after all. Many islands.

And, while there are nearly 128 million human inhabitants in Japan, including Astrid and her physicist/inventer husband, Howard Preston's son, Max, who loves, and has worked in Japan for nearly five years, Ms. Preston quietly computes the evocative challenges of Japan's endless contradictions, emerging with an awesome clarity. Japan has never looked so good. And while the free extent of a bonsai tree's predilections may be held back, its intimations are not. The river through Kyoto is encased in concrete, but the thousands of garden monasteries across that great heart-throb of a city bring perpetual renewal to all sides of Japanese artistic, spiritual and emotional life. Ms. Preston captures that as never before.

She renders commentary and a painter's reckoning made all the more poignant in the sense that Japan is fully exposed to the forces of the wilderness - earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, typhoons. A cosmos as artistic and religious as it is hazardous.

Indeed, Japan is the 35th biological “hotspot” on the planet (Ms. Preston's home, Southern California, also a biological hotspot); stricken with a huge number of endemic plants and animals on the verge of extinction. In Ms. Preston's art form, these underlying truths are something of a sub-text; a potent divining rod that emerges - if one takes the time to contemplate humanity's unique plight - as something of an ecological dangling modifier: What is our true place in the world? Clearly, art as championed by this technically-flawless painter, has a huge capacity to heal wounds, mend morbidity, dispel bleakness, and signal at once a rejuvenation of the spirit that harkens back to the wilderness so consciously celebrated by luminaries like Thoreau, George Inness, or Guo Xi of the Northern Song Dynasty in China (ca. 1020 - 1090).

As a child growing up in suburban Stockholm for her first six years, Ms. Preston was enchanted by Nordic nature. Her family had a rural house atop a small hill above a lake, surrounded by forest. The three year old used to ski down that hill, skate on the frozen water, and wander off on animal trails. Immersed in forests, as Sweden happily remains, in the Summer and Fall the young Astrid loved roaming, lying upon the giving Earth and drawing apples upon large sheets of drafting paper (both her parents being architects). But to this day she ponders whether the apples were “upside down” or not, a conjecture that confronts viewers of her prolific work with similar issues: what is vicarious nature (visited upon our consciousness through the intercession of others) and what is true original nature, the “source,” as she describes it one morning in her Santa Monica home, surrounded by large vistas but mostly (with the exception of an arroyo of sycamores) populated by characteristically non-native species from all over the world: pines, a cypress, palms and an explicitly-glorious garden of herbs, mulberry, exotic succulents, home-grown vegetables and a who's who of flowering plants leading to one of the highest hills in the region along a moss-covered stone walkway.